An internship should be like, “Hey, you have some free time after school or on weekends or something? Want to come through and volunteer a few hours of your day to find out whether this is something you’re interested in?” Not, “Hey, have a whole summer to spend in an expensive city in which you will work 9-to-5 for free because nobody wants to pay you in a dying industry?” Okay, that was with journalism in mind, but I mean… why life gotta be so hard? Not all of us have the capital to afford ridiculously expensive internship opportunities. Some of us got problems to come home to.
I’m locked out of the art gallery, waiting for the artist to wake up around 1 p.m. and read an email from the curator going, “Hey, Jennifer is interning today, so one of you go let her in at noon.” I don’t mind the wait. I’m not doing anything related to the art gallery until I’m in since, after all, I’m just volunteering my time. Whether or not this becomes a job for me doesn’t really matter, but I want to work hard enough to continue being around gallery-owning, -running, -caring people, plus all the creative people who come through. Is that shallow?
Jules is in town! We’re doing lots of things and eating lots of things. I’ve been passing out happily every night. Julia and I met in my third year of college. She found my blog after searching up a story about cookies and messaged me on Facebook. We became friends. We were only able to take one class together and it was a Comp 101 class we pwn’d. I’m using “pwn’d” because I think that’s a verb reserved for nerdy things, like Comp 101 classes.
We talked about our dreams. Not our aspirational dreams, but our actual when-we-go-to-sleep-at-night-and-wake-up-in-the-morning-more-enlightened-by-REM-cycles-and-subsconscious-conversions-of-reality dreams. She had a dream where she threw away an item that had been left at her parent’s tailor shop for a long time, only to have the owner come in the next day and ask for it. She thought it was about missed opportunities. I told her about my dream in which Sen Morimoto was in LA and he called me to run errands for him. In my dream I wondered why I was putting up with his demands. I thought it was about being eager to please.
Kitty and I are having conversations about what it means to be an art gallery in an area that’s being or has been gentrified. She’s pretty cool and also a ’93 girl, which increasingly means something to me. I think the artists in the studio spaces, R and K, are our age too, or at least they both graduated in 2015. R does video work and K does photography and the curator owns the space. I’m the lowly intern who doesn’t mind organizing cardboard boxes and walking to Ralph’s for a Pelligrino. I’m here for the lively art discussions and the potential of snagging a rich Chinese suitor.
I’m at the laundromat with Jules now. We went to get dinner at my old job and boba at the first job I had moving out here. It feels good to have moved on. Sometimes I step back for a moment and realize I am
tired
,
but it’s okay.
I’m happy.
A STOR¥ BY ? 